White Guilt is actually White Narcissism

[whatthehey]

23. Bit of truth I would guess here, but a problem?

I'm not particularly absorbed in racial issues, but I know that I both consciously reject any notions of racial superiority while, mostly subconsciously but not always, have adopted some racist attitudes. Does it bother me? Sure, a bit. Do I overcompensate in narcissitic ways? Possibly occasionally yep. However it's almost impossible to not have racial prejudices (not necessarily negative assumptions per se, for example I might expect a black sprinter to win a televised 100m race, knowing nothing about the runners' abilities) which in whites in the US is complicated by benefitting from institutional racism, so anyone self-aware and reflective is bound to have some twinges. I'd say the problem is with those who do not try to compensate for realized bias.

This becomes a minefield however in any informed discussion because there ARE generalizable cultural, or rather subcultural, differences which mean both some behaviors and some outcomes are likely to be different for blacks on aggregate as opposed to whites. These are never universal and rarely normative. Not all black men are better basketball players than all white men, but the vast majority of NBA players are black for good reasons; the cultural importance of the game and impetus to pursue excellence at it are stronger among the black population for a start, generally speaking. Please note what I said about universalization before you respond. Is it normatively superior or inferior to care so much about basketball as opposed to, say, hockey? Nothing but subjective bias would say so. Things however get worse where normative impulses are not purely subjective, and we need to be able to talk about those.

People shouldn't kill each other is largely unquestioned as normative, and it should not rationally be seen as racist to say black people do so at a higher rate than white people in the US. It certainly WOULD be racist to say they do so because they are black, rather than a whole host of socioeconomic and cultural reasons, racism itself not least among them, but that white liberal narcissistic response often quashes such discussions, assuming even noting data must be racist. Even here, where such a discussion would naturally be focused on why the hell our shared culture is more likely to turn black men into killers than white men and what if anything we can do to stop that over time, rather than the Fox/Yahoo bilge that it somehow comes through the melanin, the hypersensitive narcissistic guilt described just tends to shout "racist!" and pretend it's solved the problem and done something honorable. THAT is the problem with overcompensated guilt, and it is inimical to the stated and conscious goals of avowed non-racists.